Britannia Radio

concerned about the UK's relationship with the EU),

In the last few weeks media coverage of the euro’s travails has sometimes verged on the ridiculous. No one yet has forecast that the sky will fall in, but – if television and the newspapers are to be believed – the world economy in 2012 is in great peril if the Eurozone breaks up or loses a member or two.

This is nonsense, rather like the Y2K and mad cow disease nonsenses inflicted on us in the past. If Greece quits the Eurozone, people across the globe still have the same skills and equipment as before, the same ways of agreeing contracts and preparing accounts, the same customers and brand goodwill, and so on. The significance of both Europe and the Eurozone must be kept in proportion. Because of the rise of China and other emerging nations in the last 30 years, Europe and the single currency area are much less important to the prosperity of other countries, including the UK, than they used to be.

In 1980 the countries that now belong to the European Union accounted for almost a third (31.4%, to be exact, according to data from the International Monetary Fund) of world output. That has now tumbled to 20.0% and, in the IMF’s view, will drop to 17.6% by 2016. If we were to deduct the UK from the total, the EU share of world output by the middle of the current decade would be about 15%. Yes, 85% of world output – and hence much of the demand for the products and services we sell – will be from countries that do not belong to the EU. Indeed, the non-Eurozone share will approach 90%.

The accompanying article has been prepared for one of UKIP’s newspapers, of which there are apparently about a dozen in total. Editors often request material from me. This is very nice, I am flattered, and I will do my best to keep up. However, the number of hours in the day, the number of days in the week etc. is finite, and I would be delighted if the attached could be ‘syndicated to the entire “UKIP regional press”’, if I may put it that way. It can be tweaked for the different papers.

The current shenanigans in the Conservative Party – and to some extent in the other parties represented at Westminster – carry an obvious message. Sooner or later, at some point or other over the next five to ten years, the British people will be consulted in an IN/OUT referendum on EU membership. (All credit to Nikki Sinclaire MEP for driving the Campaign for a Referendum. What a fantastic achievement for her and her many supporters in UKIP.) I have only a couple of comments here.

First, the referendum must be an IN/OUT referendum. It must not be a referendum that includes the weasel word 'renegotiation'. The politicians and bureaucrats love renegotiating, not least because it keeps them in a job. Renegotiation would allow them to dither, equivocate and delay until the glorious day when they qualify for their pensions; it would also allow them to ignore the clear desire of a majority of British people to withdraw from the failed and unsuccessful European Union.

Secondly, and perhaps surprisingly, many Eurosceptic-inclined people believe that the withdrawalists would lose a referendum. The argument is that, just as in 1975, the various opinion-forming establishments of our country – the BBC and the Foreign Office, as well as hordes of Europhile academics, journalists, intellectuals and so on - would not only put over more words than the withdrawalists, but also do so with more reason, intelligence, passion, conviction, etc. Even worse the EU will chuck money at them, to bribe them into the production of large quantities of high-quality verbiage. So the pro-EU camp would win.

I regard this sort of argument as rubbish, not least because I have been involved in a number of exchanges with Europhiles in the last couple of years. Most of the Europhile debaters are pathetic, whether they are receiving bribes from the Commission or not. I am pretty confident that, in the coming battles, the withdrawalists will produce a larger number of effective and persuasive words than the pro-EU integrationists. It is certainly one of UKIP’s challenges to contribute to and expand that flow of words.

(On a rather different note, I have a new book – Money in a Free Society – being published tomorrow. Launch parties for the book are being held at meetings of two think-tanks, Politeia on 7^th November and the Institute of Economic Affairs on 8^th November. A notice for the first of these meetings is a further attachment, while details of the second can be found at http://www.iea.org.uk/events/money-in-a-free-society. There is no particular EU or UKIP angle, and the book is in fact mostly intended for the American market.)

With best wishes,

Tim Congdon